Less Marketing. Better Results.

Less Marketing. Better Results.

The Case Against Marketing for Marketing's Sake

Jeez - isn't there an awful lot of marketing going on!

Facebook. LinkedIn. Instagram. Pinterest. Reels. Newsletters. Blogs. Campaigns. Emails. WhatsApp. Promotions. Seasonal events. National whatever-it-is day. Content calendars. More posts. More reels. More content. More. More, more.

Hurray. Just as well AI has made it possible to produce even more of it, even faster!

Wonderful!

Except, at the risk of going all Jurassic Park on your posterior, just because you can, doesn't mean you should!

After all, what's it all actually achieving?

Because somewhere along the way, marketing seems to have become a competition to see who can produce the most stuff. If you're not producing stuff, you're not marketing.

And whatever you do, don't let your competitors post more often than you!

It's exhausting. And in my opinion, not particularly clever or useful.

Activity is not a strategy

I've spent much of my working life in marketing, including at director level, launching and developing brands, managing budgets, leading teams and making decisions about where businesses should invest their money.

More recently, I've spent years photographing food, drink and hospitality businesses, seeing first-hand the extraordinary care that goes into creating something worth buying.

Those two experiences have led me to a fairly simple conclusion.

A lot of businesses are working far too hard at marketing without asking nearly enough questions about what it's supposed to achieve.

And I don't think that's entirely their fault.

There's an enormous industry telling businesses what they must do to succeed.

You must be on TikTok, because that's where people are. You must make reels, because that gets reach. You must embrace AI, because you're too slow on your own. You must post regularly, or you'll be forgotten. You must follow the trends, or you'll be irrelevant.

Really?

What if your customers aren't on TikTok? What if your latest reel does absolutely nothing to influence how customers perceive your business? Or, worse still, says the wrong things?What if your carefully planned campaign communicates precisely nothing about what makes your business worth choosing? What if your customers don't care what you did at the weekend?

Should you still do it?

I don't think so.

And can we talk about the pictures?

Here's something that particularly gets my goat.

A restaurant spends years developing its food, recruiting talented chefs, refining its menu and creating an experience its customers will love.

Then it advertises that experience using a generic stock photograph of somebody else's dinner.

Or, increasingly, an AI-generated image of a dish that has never actually existed.

Why?

The entire point of marketing is to give people a compelling reason to choose your business.

How does showing them something that isn't yours achieve that?

Of course, stock photography and AI imagery have legitimate uses. I've used stock imagery in marketing myself. There's a place for both.

But using them to represent the actual products, people, places and experiences that are your business?

That's a very different matter.

If your business has something genuinely worth showing, show it.

And if you think your own product isn't good enough to photograph, perhaps that's an even more interesting marketing problem to solve.

Less marketing doesn't mean less ambition

I don't want businesses to stop marketing. Of course I don't.

But I want them to get more from the effort, creativity and money they put into it.

That means starting with some rather unfashionable questions.

What are we trying to achieve? Who are we trying to influence? Why should they choose us? What do they need to see, hear or believe before they make that decision?

And, crucially, how will this particular piece of marketing help?

If there's no convincing answer, perhaps we shouldn't do it.

And if you ever find yourself saying, 'This just needs to do X, Y and Z', stop and have a word with yourself. Because even the smallest tactical activity should contribute to your wider business objectives. Every single piece of marketing should be pulling in the same direction.

That doesn't mean every activity needs to generate an immediate sale. Brand building matters. Familiarity matters. Trust matters. Understanding and resonance matter. Sometimes the purpose is simply to make sure people remember you when the time comes.

But that's still a purpose.

And it deserves as much thought as a sales promotion. In fact, every sales promotion should be doing some of those things too. Every piece of marketing represents your business, and every piece is an opportunity to reinforce what you want people to think and feel about it.

So what's this Bleatable newsletter all about?

'Gordon Ram Says' is my place to question the habits, assumptions and occasional absurdities of modern marketing.

I'll be writing particularly about food, drink and hospitality, because these are businesses I know, admire and want to see succeed.

We'll look at the psychology of buying decisions, the commercial value of good creative work, the relationship between brand and sales, and why some marketing succeeds while an awful lot of it just makes noise.

We'll talk about photography, obviously. About authenticity, AI, customer perception, pricing, positioning and the seductive appeal of vanity metrics.

And we'll question some of the advice that businesses hear so often that they've stopped asking whether it's actually true.

There will be research, examples, opinions and, I suspect, the occasional disagreement.

I'm not promising to have all the answers. But I do intend to ask better questions.

Because good marketing deserves thought, not just another content calendar.

Less Marketing. Better Results.

And if that sounds like something worth discussing, welcome to Bleatable.

Gordon and I have quite a lot to get off our chests!